Los Angeles: miasto ruchomych obrazów

Dla Europejczyka fascynacja Ameryką ma charakter zauroczenia dziwacznością. Przejawia się ona w rzeczywistości stanowiącej ponowoczesną mieszaninę fragmentarycznych doznań, które manifestują się w obrazie zarówno wielkich miast amerykańskich jak i architekturze przydrożnej. Autorka poddaje analizie horyzontalnie rozciągnięte Los Angeles jako żywiołowe widowisko ruchu ulicznego. Pomimo powstających wciąż nowych ikonicznych dzieł architektury, bezkształtność, amorficzność i rozproszenie formacji przestrzennych tego miasta nie pozwalają na prawidłowe odczytanie jego struktur. Z badań autorki wysuwa się wniosek, iż nie budynki czy historyczne miejsca, lecz właśnie ruch uliczny i system autostradowy stanowią głównie o charakterze tego miasta, którego wizerunek utrwaliło wielkie kino. Los Angeles: a city of moving images To Europeans, fascination with America is like being charmed by oddity. It manifests itself in a reality that is a postmodern mixture of fragmentary experiences that manifest themselves in the image of both large American cities and roadside architecture. I analyse the horizontally stretched Los Angeles as a lively spectacle of street traffic. Despite newer and newer iconic works of architecture, shapelessness, amorphousness and scattering of this city’s spatial formations does not allow for a proper reading of its structures. My study concludes that it is not buildings or historical sites but street traffic and the highway system that define the character of this city, whose image was enhanced by world-class cinema.

Lessons at the roadside

Architects should learn to communicate more through their architecture. The commercial vernacular architecture of the American ‘strip’ – motels, gas stations, fast food outlets – communicates loud and clear. In comparison, high architecture, particularly the high architecture of Modernism, is sullen and silent. This, roughly, is the thesis of Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour (1972 and 1977), one of the key texts of the Post-Modernist movement in architectural theory of the early 1970s. Venturi et al thought architects could learn a lot about symbolism and communication from the sort of non-judgmental study of roadside architecture that their students had undertaken at Yale. In the second half of the book the idea was developed into a theory and encapsulated into a universal building concept, ‘the decorated shed’, which has since become a cliché of architectural criticism. The decorated shed was designed to overthrow the most cherished beliefs and rituals of Modernism. Expression through form was to be replaced by the ‘persuasive heraldry’ of the totem and the billboard; articulation of detail was to be replaced by old-fashioned applied ornament; and the ‘heroic and original’ was to be replaced by the ‘ugly and ordinary’. But the emphasis was on the decoration rather than the shed. Learning from Las Vegas did not have much to say about the way that the sheds of the commercial strip were constructed, other than describing them vaguely as ‘system built’, or about the implications that the technology of their construction might have for architectural practice.